Re:Stop the anti-people ideology and you'll succee
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Everything else is just you complaining that you don't want to be bothered to make a sacrifice where the payoff isn't immediately visible.
Or maybe the payoff is that global warming is good for humanity in general by increasing food output, which is something environmentalists hardly ever talk about, and your recycling programs went counter to it. Or, much more likely, no matter what I do with my insulation, China's going to pollute the hell out of everything they can touch and it simply won't matter.
Maybe there is no payoff at all, ever think of that?
Does it still count if I write a blog post encouraging people to pollute as much as possible, and basically piss all over the environment at every opportunity? Because that's how I feel after having "global warming" crammed in my face for the last six months.
I'm mildly surprised so many hard-core right wingers are okay with the government spying on them.
They're not as paranoid as you are. The government is not spying on you, the government doesn't give a crap what you do. Now, if you decided to donate a hundred thousand bucks to some fringe Islamic group, then the government may start caring about you and, I think, most hard-core right-wingers would agree with that entirely.
A hugely expensive mistake, but at least no lives were lost. Plus, what it taught (taut?) us about engineering has been invaluable... before the Tacoma Narrows collapse, architects never even considered resonance while designing structures.
So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.
You should try it. I seriously think they've broken new ground with 2007; usabiity is increased dramatically. And 2003 introduced the new note-taking tools and online collaboration that's pretty slick.
Of course, that's kind of irrelevant to this discussion, as OpenOffice still doesn't even really match the featureset of Office 97.
If all you want is a commercial Exchange replacement, I believe you would be better of with Postfix (http://www.postfix.com). There is no connectors required. And it interacts with other exchange servers, as an Exchange Server. It is a drop-in replacement, that runs on Linux.
It's a drop-in replacement for about 1/10th of the features Exchange has.
Try not to tell us about drop-in replacements for products until you have at least a vague idea of what that product does. Have you even used Outlook?
Professional writers should be using a system designed for actual writing like LaTeX rather than an office program like MS Office or OpenOffice.org. In fact, many do,
Maybe open source programmers should spend more time getting their programs to do X instead of just telling people "you shouldn't be doing X at all." Yes, Word shouldn't (according to some weird moral code in your head) be used to write a novel, that doesn't change the fact that it *is* used to write novels. And Excel shouldn't (according to the messages beams into your head by the martians) be used to do data processing with more than a few hundred rows, but here in reality there are thousands of spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows that got the job done in less time than it takes to just install MySQL on a server.
I'm ripping this off of a comment I saw recently on Slashdot (sorry), but here it goes again:
This may surprise you, but most people don't want to learn a programming language to write a document.
and the ones that try to use MS Word or other word processors generally have fun trying to get pagination to work or automatic outlining to work right or many other problems that occur once you write more than a few dozen pages in Word.
I've never had problems with documents hundreds of pages in length. I'm calling BS on this as a Slashdot urban legend.
There's Exchange/Outlook, used by all companies that don't hate their users. There's Lotus Domino/Notes, used by the companies who do hate their users. Then there's whatever Netware was selling a few years back, if it even still exists...
So yes, by "lots of other servers available" you mean "up to two, if Novell is still selling theirs."
Sun Microsystems (ever heard of them?) write OO.o - they have something like 50 full-time employees hacking away on it, and I believe IBM have pledged a further 25.
I don't have much experience with Sun software, but I can guarantee that anything IBM makes intended for the end user is going to suck, and it's going to suck hard. This is the company that sells Lotus Notes to their customers, and tells them with a straight face that it's better than Outlook. IBM knows nothing about usability or giving people what they want; all they do is produce something that's almost entirely broken, then selling consulting services at $250/hour to fix it to the "mostly broken" state.
To most people there is no difference, unless they work for big companies.
Well der. The point, to spell it out more clearly, is that the people who are developing OpenOffice aren't coming up with features that big companies want, and big companies are the ones holding the majority of Office licenses.
I was rather under the impression that the integration of office components with each other and tightly with windows, while nice in theory, actually made it a horrible security threat. Applications that co-operated but existed wholly apart from the OS, other than running on it would be a good thing.
Not enough of a security threat to bother any of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have purchased it. But more seriously, macros are completely reined-in, Outlook restricts everything, IE7 has as many security features as Firefox and runs in a sandbox in Vista to boot. (It's not part of Office, but I figured someone would bring it up.) And, frankly, it's been years since anybody has seen a macro virus, or another virus that uses Office to spread, and so even if there is still some security threat to these products more-so than to OpenOffice (which frankly I doubt), there's a sense of calm in that area right now.
Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties. Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort? (I haven't used it in a few years, and their website is so horrible it doesn't even have a basic page describing the features of the product, nor does it have screenshots, or basically anything you'd want to see before downloading it.)
Openoffice is very nice MS Office has the edge on maturity, but I don't like the locked in nature of the document formats.
I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask:
Which would you rather have? A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references? B) A slightly more open document format?
It saves your data in a format which can be opened by any other software that chooses to support it, and it costs nothing to install. If there's a document you're unable to create with it, chances are you don't know how to use it properly.
To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.
Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.
Now, you're right, that technically I didn't *need* word count to complete this task. I could have manually counted through all the words. You also don't technically need a good outline view, since you can manually select and drag huge blocks of text around the document. You also don't technically need video support in Impress, because you can just tell the viewers to close their eyes and imagine what it might look like. So I guess in that sense you're technically correct.
If they really want to compete in the corporate realm, they need a drop-in replacement for *Exchange* (or Domino among the less savvy corporations), not Outlook. I agree with you entirely that this, along with so many other things that OpenOffice does (lack of a good outline mode, lack of accurate word count, crummy chart rendering, lack of video in presentation tool) just shows how completely, 100% out-of-touch OpenOffice developers are with anybody who actually uses Office to get stuff done.
The hardware determines the size of the disk, for one. But I was pointing out general reasons the Gamecube was kind of crappy, I didn't say "only the hardware" was crappy or "only the software" was crappy.
The gamecube was a work of art design wise compared to either of it's competitors. I don't see why you'd call it crummy.
Because it had about 4 good games the entire lifetime of the system? Because it came out at the same time as the Xbox, but was barely more powerful than the (relatively ancient) PS2? Because it was the only console on the market that had no online play and couldn't play DVDs? Because the wacky disk they used instead of DVDs could only hold 1.5 GB, so cross-platform ports had to be trimmed down for Gamecube? Because it's weird top-loading disk system meant it didn't fit in a lot of people's entertainment centers?
If you went back in time and killed Hitler in, say, 1900, you'd probably be tried and convicted of murdering an 11-year old boy and sent to spend the rest of your life in prison.
If you go back in time and kill someone, you did commit a murder... regardless of what that person may or may not do in the future. If you went back in time to 1945 and killed Hitler on the 29th of April, 1945, you also did commit a murder. The crime of murder is independent of the nature of the person being murdered.
The funny thing is that when Slashdot Games just started, before the Wii came out (Revolution was a much better name, BTW!), the Slashdot collective opinion was just as excited for the Gamecube, even though the Gamecube was a clear loser last generation.
I don't get where the Nintendo bias comes from, personally, except that a lot of Slashdotters seem pretty crotchety when it comes to computers... I get the impression that a lot of people here wish technology had just stopped in the early 90s, and they simply dislike anything that deviates from that mold. Thus the focus on CLI environments, complaining about 'bloat' (features!) in software products, liking the Nintendo's simplier/crummier but more purpose-focused hardware, etc.
there would be no issue, but this is no different than say, Japan allowing the Japanese to buy only Japanese cars, and banning the import or purchase of American cars, while at the same time heavily advertising Japanese imports to America.
Japan does do that. They don't ban imports, though, they just attach so many taxes and duties to them that only the super-rich can afford them.
It is a rare event in this world that a good person doing a good thing is recognised. Except for the odd right-wingers who will respond to this (as an anonymous coward, no doubt), everyone on this planet owes Mr. Gore a debt of gratitude.
I don't owe Mr Gore a debt of gratitude. Frankly, he hasn't done anything for me except encourage companies like e-surance and Dell to constantly market to me about how "green" and "carbon-neutral" they are and ask me if I want to plant trees when I go to buy products. If anything, Gore's clouded the issue further with his "we must fix this at all costs" attitude.
Even if you don't believe in the human-influence on global warming (something I accept), you must admit that it's pretty obvious that all the pollution and greenhouse gases that we humans cause to be put into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing.
I dunno, I've heard from a few sources that it will increase the amount of land that can be used to produce food, and surely being able to feed more people is a good thing. Seems to me that global warming is more a situation of "there are winners and loser" than "everybody loses." Some countries/regions that have increased food production will come out winners, and some countries/regions will come out losers for that and other reasons.
It's also a matter of prioritization. Sure, we can spend billions making sure every powerplant is releasing 30% less carbon than before, or we can spend the same amount of money installing water filters to provide people with clean water. Which is a better use of money? Environmentalists seem to ignore the prioritization aspect of the problem, instead focusing on "we must fix the environment at all costs."
What I do agree with is reducing our dependence on foreign oil. But we can just as easily do that by drilling for oil in Canada, Mexico and the US. Even though the "easy" oil is gone, the cost per barrel coming from OPEC is up to the point where switching back to North American oil wouldn't have a huge economic impact.
What I'd really like to see is a balanced summary of the impact of global warming from an environmentalist without all the apocalyptic bullcrap. No, the world is not ending, the sky is not falling, no matter how much Gore wants it to.
(Why isn't the word prioritization in Firefox's dictionary?)
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Everything else is just you complaining that you don't want to be bothered to make a sacrifice where the payoff isn't immediately visible.
Or maybe the payoff is that global warming is good for humanity in general by increasing food output, which is something environmentalists hardly ever talk about, and your recycling programs went counter to it. Or, much more likely, no matter what I do with my insulation, China's going to pollute the hell out of everything they can touch and it simply won't matter.
Maybe there is no payoff at all, ever think of that?
Does it still count if I write a blog post encouraging people to pollute as much as possible, and basically piss all over the environment at every opportunity? Because that's how I feel after having "global warming" crammed in my face for the last six months.
It's a good thing not a lot of people share your viewpoint, or there'd be no technological progress at all.
I'm mildly surprised so many hard-core right wingers are okay with the government spying on them.
They're not as paranoid as you are. The government is not spying on you, the government doesn't give a crap what you do. Now, if you decided to donate a hundred thousand bucks to some fringe Islamic group, then the government may start caring about you and, I think, most hard-core right-wingers would agree with that entirely.
At 3:00 AM, yes. The same as Windows XP SP2 does by default.
In situations where you would bill per word in english, you bill per character in Japanese and Chinese languages.
In any case, regardless of how you bill, there's simply no excuse for OpenOffice giving the wrong word count.
And "the structure" was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, in Tacoma, Washington.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge
A hugely expensive mistake, but at least no lives were lost. Plus, what it taught (taut?) us about engineering has been invaluable... before the Tacoma Narrows collapse, architects never even considered resonance while designing structures.
Goddamned, just shut up. You're bringing the level of discussion here to sub-kindergarten levels, seriously.
So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.
You should try it. I seriously think they've broken new ground with 2007; usabiity is increased dramatically. And 2003 introduced the new note-taking tools and online collaboration that's pretty slick.
Of course, that's kind of irrelevant to this discussion, as OpenOffice still doesn't even really match the featureset of Office 97.
If all you want is a commercial Exchange replacement, I believe you would be better of with Postfix (http://www.postfix.com). There is no connectors required. And it interacts with other exchange servers, as an Exchange Server. It is a drop-in replacement, that runs on Linux.
It's a drop-in replacement for about 1/10th of the features Exchange has.
Try not to tell us about drop-in replacements for products until you have at least a vague idea of what that product does. Have you even used Outlook?
Professional writers should be using a system designed for actual writing like LaTeX rather than an office program like MS Office or OpenOffice.org. In fact, many do,
Maybe open source programmers should spend more time getting their programs to do X instead of just telling people "you shouldn't be doing X at all." Yes, Word shouldn't (according to some weird moral code in your head) be used to write a novel, that doesn't change the fact that it *is* used to write novels. And Excel shouldn't (according to the messages beams into your head by the martians) be used to do data processing with more than a few hundred rows, but here in reality there are thousands of spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows that got the job done in less time than it takes to just install MySQL on a server.
I'm ripping this off of a comment I saw recently on Slashdot (sorry), but here it goes again:
This may surprise you, but most people don't want to learn a programming language to write a document.
and the ones that try to use MS Word or other word processors generally have fun trying to get pagination to work or automatic outlining to work right or many other problems that occur once you write more than a few dozen pages in Word.
I've never had problems with documents hundreds of pages in length. I'm calling BS on this as a Slashdot urban legend.
There's Exchange/Outlook, used by all companies that don't hate their users. There's Lotus Domino/Notes, used by the companies who do hate their users. Then there's whatever Netware was selling a few years back, if it even still exists...
So yes, by "lots of other servers available" you mean "up to two, if Novell is still selling theirs."
Sun Microsystems (ever heard of them?) write OO.o - they have something like 50 full-time employees hacking away on it, and I believe IBM have pledged a further 25.
I don't have much experience with Sun software, but I can guarantee that anything IBM makes intended for the end user is going to suck, and it's going to suck hard. This is the company that sells Lotus Notes to their customers, and tells them with a straight face that it's better than Outlook. IBM knows nothing about usability or giving people what they want; all they do is produce something that's almost entirely broken, then selling consulting services at $250/hour to fix it to the "mostly broken" state.
To most people there is no difference, unless they work for big companies.
Well der. The point, to spell it out more clearly, is that the people who are developing OpenOffice aren't coming up with features that big companies want, and big companies are the ones holding the majority of Office licenses.
I was rather under the impression that the integration of office components with each other and tightly with windows, while nice in theory, actually made it a horrible security threat. Applications that co-operated but existed wholly apart from the OS, other than running on it would be a good thing.
Not enough of a security threat to bother any of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have purchased it. But more seriously, macros are completely reined-in, Outlook restricts everything, IE7 has as many security features as Firefox and runs in a sandbox in Vista to boot. (It's not part of Office, but I figured someone would bring it up.) And, frankly, it's been years since anybody has seen a macro virus, or another virus that uses Office to spread, and so even if there is still some security threat to these products more-so than to OpenOffice (which frankly I doubt), there's a sense of calm in that area right now.
Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties. Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort? (I haven't used it in a few years, and their website is so horrible it doesn't even have a basic page describing the features of the product, nor does it have screenshots, or basically anything you'd want to see before downloading it.)
Openoffice is very nice MS Office has the edge on maturity, but I don't like the locked in nature of the document formats.
I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask:
Which would you rather have?
A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references?
B) A slightly more open document format?
There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.
It saves your data in a format which can be opened by any other software that chooses to support it, and it costs nothing to install. If there's a document you're unable to create with it, chances are you don't know how to use it properly.
To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.
Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.
Now, you're right, that technically I didn't *need* word count to complete this task. I could have manually counted through all the words. You also don't technically need a good outline view, since you can manually select and drag huge blocks of text around the document. You also don't technically need video support in Impress, because you can just tell the viewers to close their eyes and imagine what it might look like. So I guess in that sense you're technically correct.
If they really want to compete in the corporate realm, they need a drop-in replacement for *Exchange* (or Domino among the less savvy corporations), not Outlook. I agree with you entirely that this, along with so many other things that OpenOffice does (lack of a good outline mode, lack of accurate word count, crummy chart rendering, lack of video in presentation tool) just shows how completely, 100% out-of-touch OpenOffice developers are with anybody who actually uses Office to get stuff done.
What does software have to do with hardware?
The hardware determines the size of the disk, for one. But I was pointing out general reasons the Gamecube was kind of crappy, I didn't say "only the hardware" was crappy or "only the software" was crappy.
Controls: 5 pts.
Graphics: 5 pts.
Sound: 3 pts.
Music: 2 pts.
Story: 5 pts.
Multiplayer (if applicable): 5 pts.
Runs on Linux: 50,000 pts.
The gamecube was a work of art design wise compared to either of it's competitors. I don't see why you'd call it crummy.
Because it had about 4 good games the entire lifetime of the system? Because it came out at the same time as the Xbox, but was barely more powerful than the (relatively ancient) PS2? Because it was the only console on the market that had no online play and couldn't play DVDs? Because the wacky disk they used instead of DVDs could only hold 1.5 GB, so cross-platform ports had to be trimmed down for Gamecube? Because it's weird top-loading disk system meant it didn't fit in a lot of people's entertainment centers?
If you went back in time and killed Hitler in, say, 1900, you'd probably be tried and convicted of murdering an 11-year old boy and sent to spend the rest of your life in prison.
If you go back in time and kill someone, you did commit a murder... regardless of what that person may or may not do in the future. If you went back in time to 1945 and killed Hitler on the 29th of April, 1945, you also did commit a murder. The crime of murder is independent of the nature of the person being murdered.
The funny thing is that when Slashdot Games just started, before the Wii came out (Revolution was a much better name, BTW!), the Slashdot collective opinion was just as excited for the Gamecube, even though the Gamecube was a clear loser last generation.
I don't get where the Nintendo bias comes from, personally, except that a lot of Slashdotters seem pretty crotchety when it comes to computers... I get the impression that a lot of people here wish technology had just stopped in the early 90s, and they simply dislike anything that deviates from that mold. Thus the focus on CLI environments, complaining about 'bloat' (features!) in software products, liking the Nintendo's simplier/crummier but more purpose-focused hardware, etc.
there would be no issue, but this is no different than say, Japan allowing the Japanese to buy only Japanese cars, and banning the import or purchase of American cars, while at the same time heavily advertising Japanese imports to America.
Japan does do that. They don't ban imports, though, they just attach so many taxes and duties to them that only the super-rich can afford them.
This isn't to "finish" the game. The game was shipped finished. This is more of an "encore!"
It is a rare event in this world that a good person doing a good thing is recognised. Except for the odd right-wingers who will respond to this (as an anonymous coward, no doubt), everyone on this planet owes Mr. Gore a debt of gratitude.
I don't owe Mr Gore a debt of gratitude. Frankly, he hasn't done anything for me except encourage companies like e-surance and Dell to constantly market to me about how "green" and "carbon-neutral" they are and ask me if I want to plant trees when I go to buy products. If anything, Gore's clouded the issue further with his "we must fix this at all costs" attitude.
Even if you don't believe in the human-influence on global warming (something I accept), you must admit that it's pretty obvious that all the pollution and greenhouse gases that we humans cause to be put into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing.
I dunno, I've heard from a few sources that it will increase the amount of land that can be used to produce food, and surely being able to feed more people is a good thing. Seems to me that global warming is more a situation of "there are winners and loser" than "everybody loses." Some countries/regions that have increased food production will come out winners, and some countries/regions will come out losers for that and other reasons.
It's also a matter of prioritization. Sure, we can spend billions making sure every powerplant is releasing 30% less carbon than before, or we can spend the same amount of money installing water filters to provide people with clean water. Which is a better use of money? Environmentalists seem to ignore the prioritization aspect of the problem, instead focusing on "we must fix the environment at all costs."
What I do agree with is reducing our dependence on foreign oil. But we can just as easily do that by drilling for oil in Canada, Mexico and the US. Even though the "easy" oil is gone, the cost per barrel coming from OPEC is up to the point where switching back to North American oil wouldn't have a huge economic impact.
What I'd really like to see is a balanced summary of the impact of global warming from an environmentalist without all the apocalyptic bullcrap. No, the world is not ending, the sky is not falling, no matter how much Gore wants it to.
(Why isn't the word prioritization in Firefox's dictionary?)
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."
Do you just have a macro to put that at the top of every single post?
It's over-used enough that Slashdot might as well add it into the code at this point.